1. Money rules the postmodern
world, and money is an efficacious, or "performative,"
sign: a medium of representation that attains practical power.
As we might expect, therefore, the concept of the performative
sign is theoretically central to the postmodern era' s philosophy,
politics, psychology, linguistics and -- a forteriori
-- its economics. All of these disciplines, in their postmodern
forms, privilege the performative, rather than the denotative,
aspect of signs. They all assume that signs do things, and that
the objective world is constructed for us via the realm of signification.
In the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida and Judith
Butler, the performative sign even acquires a vague association
with political radicalism, since its power can be used to deconstruct
such allegedly repressive chimeras as essence and self-identity.

2. The argument that signs are
performative by nature leads to the conclusion that there is
no prelinguistic or nonmaterial human subject, since subjective
intention is irrelevant to the sign's efficacy. The idea that
the subject is material thus takes its place alongside the notion
that representation is efficacious as a central tenet of postmodern
thought. It is not difficult to point to the connection between
these ideas in the field of "economics." Money is an
externalized representation of abstract human labor power --
that is to say, of human subjective activity, of human life.
In addition to being a system of autonomous representation, then,
money is the incarnation of objectified subjectivity. It is thus
hardly surprising to find that the idea that the subject is material,
that it is an object, is very prevalent in postmodern thought,
or that materialism dominates intellectual disciplines from sociobiology
to literary criticism. In the work of Louis Althusser and Michel
Foucault, materialism even enjoys a nebulous alliance with the
political Left, as it is used to tear down the supposedly tyrannical
framework of Christian-Platonic idealism.

3. The allied illusions that
signification is necessarily performative and that the subject
is material constitute the ideology of the postmodern epoch.
But this affirmative attitude to the material subject and the
performative sign is historically quite recent, and a comparison
with the stance adopted by pre- or early-capitalist societies
towards these phenomena yields some sobering conclusions. In
the current work in progress, I use the early treatments of the
story of Doctor Faustus to argue that in sixteenth century Europe,
performative signification and objectified subjectivity were
identified with, respectively, magic and idolatry, and that these
ideological illusions corresponded precisely to the age's understanding
of the worldly influence of "Satan."

4. The Faust myth emerges as
part of a pan-European effort to criminalize all magic. To that
end, it defines magic as the belief in the efficacy of signs,
and it claims to show that such a belief of necessity involves
an agreement with Satan. The sphere of representation is the
Satanic version of God's natural creation,1 and to use representation to achieve objective
ends (to "do things with words" in J.L. Austin's famous
phrase) is to invoke Satan's power against God's. If we consider
the ethical implications of this position, we may have some idea
of how dramatically the postmodern world has broken with the
basic moral assumptions that remain, despite everything, our
ethical heritage.

II

5. The early modern debate over
the existence of witches seems rather naive from the perspective
of postmodernity. By the late seventeenth century, many educated
Europeans had convinced themselves, or had been convinced, that
witches and magic simply did not exist. In the twenty-first century,
on the other hand, nobody doubts the existence of witches --
the only questions at issue are the nature of witchcraft and
the efficacy of magic. Opinions on these matters vary geographically.
Among my students in the USA are several young women who claim
to practice witchcraft; they are regarded by their peers as quite
normal individuals and their powers are not feared. Next to my
keyboard as I write sits a dried llama fetus that I bought from
a witch, in the "witches market" in La Paz, Bolivia.
In Central and South America, witchcraft is perceived as a sophisticated
craft and a legitimate, if slightly dubious, profession. Since
the 1970's, in contrast, witchcraft has been legally prosecuted
as a serious crime in much of Africa, reversing a century of
colonial and neo-colonial policy which simply denied, in the
face of glaring empirical evidence, that there were any such
creatures as witches.

6. In the colonies, witches
could be prosecuted for fraud but not for witchcraft. The colonial
legal system presupposed that magic was purely illusory, and
colonial churches made the elimination of belief in witchcraft
-- as opposed to witchcraft itself -- a top priority; Christian
and Muslim missionaries continue to follow this policy today.
The European powers took it as a sacred duty to replace magical
views of the world with rational ones. By the end of the twentieth
century, however, this process of "enlightenment" had
been subjected to such cogent philosophical and political critiques
that few people would endorse it unequivocally. We are much more
conscious than our forbears of the complicity between reason
and magic, and many would argue that the postmodern era -- with
its virtual reality, its faith in the image, its electronic money,
its new age religions -- is witnessing a return to the kinds
of overtly magical thinking that imperialism unsuccessfully tried
to stamp out in the southern hemisphere.

7. The colonial state was generally
regarded by the natives as pro-witch, partly because colonial
governments suppressed the prosecution of witches, but also because
imperialist values and practices were perceived as sharing much
in common with witchcraft. Throughout the postcolonial world,
witches and sorcerers are thought to have seized the opportunity
provided by colonial rule to greatly increase and consolidate
their power. Few Western observers today would regard such opinions
with the amused condescension of the Victorians. Most anthropologists
and sociologists of religion would now broadly endorse the view
of Eric de Rosny, writing in 1981:

Due to my direct and constant involvement in Duala with victims
and sometimes also with accusers [i.e. of witchcraft], I have
come to see that evil sorciers do exist in flesh and blood.
No doubt they are infinitely less numerous than my panicky spokesmen
affirmed, but they are nonetheless all too real. They are either
people who manipulate others' credulity for their own profit
(sometimes even using poison); or persons who are not conscious
of their own perversity. Aren't there in every society certain
perverted persons who -- without even knowing it -- make their
fellow men ill by draining their vital energy from them, thus
depersonalizing them -- in other words, "eating" them?2

Early anthropological studies of African witchcraft often
expressed surprise that the belief in magic was growing, not
declining, with colonization. This unexpected flourishing of
sorcery was often interpreted as an attempt to rationalize the
more malign effects of the traumatic adaptation to modernity.
In 1935 Audrey Richards commented that "economic and social
changes have so shattered tribal institutions and moral codes
that the result of white contact is in many cases an actual increase
in the dread of witchcraft".3
The dawn of modernity seems to have brought about a similar resurgence
in the fear of witchcraft in sixteenth-century Europe.4 In Africa, this fear worsened under neocolonialism,
when the rulers of nominally independent nations clearly derived
their power from nebulous, impersonal, external sources such
as the global economy or the I.M.F. Thus Jean and John Comaroff
report that the elite class in Malawi "are suspected of
having struck a Faustian deal with the whites."5

8. It is worth dwelling on the
use of the term "Faustian" here. Most Westerners would
probably agree that the Malawi ruling class has made a shady
bargain with the former colonial rulers, in order to attain wealth
and influence at the expense of their nation. That is, most Westerners
would agree that they have "struck a Faustian deal with
the whites" in a figurative sense. Africans, in contrast,
would tend to argue that they have "struck a Faustian deal
with the whites" in a literal sense. The colonizing
power was evil in a metaphysical rather than merely in an economic
way, and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism are literally dealing
with the devil, employing such means as ritual magic, animal
sacrifice and quite possibly anthropophagy. It is common knowledge
that some members of African elites literally do engage in such
practices, and that their purpose is precisely to achieve power
and riches. Surely we cannot call this a merely figurative pact
with the devil. In fact, we in the West need to question the
categorical distinction we make between "economic"
exploitation and "metaphysical" evil. Such distinctions
made no sense in sixteenth century Europe any more than they
do in contemporary Africa. It may be that the belief that the
power of metaphysical evil -- we might simply say "Satan"
-- does not exert any influence on the material world is the
most pernicious of all superstitions.

9. There has been an enormous
amount of scholarly interest in magic and witchcraft over the
past couple of decades. Such scholarship tends to focus either
on early modern Europe and North America, or on postmodern Africa
and South America. The striking similarities between witchcraft
discourses in, for example, England in 1602 and Cameroon in 2002
have led to some fascinating forays into comparative analysis,
involving the interdisciplinary efforts of anthropologists and
historians. The most obvious point of comparison is the fact
that both early modern Europe and postmodern Africa are societies
in which traditional beliefs and values are being forcibly displaced
by contact with the global market economy. Michael Taussig's
seminal work, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
(1980) opened the floodgates for a wave of anthropological studies
of postcolonial societies that employ witchcraft as a conceptual
vocabulary to describe the empirical and psychological effects
of global capitalism. Taussig found that the introduction of
wage labor into South American peasant cultures produced a demonology
that notably recalls the obsession with the diabolical that attended
the same process in early modern Europe: "the fabled devil
contract is an indictment of an economic system which forces
men to barter their souls for the destructive power of commodities."6 His account of the demonological
practices of Bolivian tin miners is reminiscent of the beliefs
of their counterparts in sixteenth-century Europe. For instance,
Johann Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum (1563) reports
the miners' lore regarding the demons who labor alongside them.
It is notable that Weyer, a sceptic by the standards of the age,
does not deny the existence of the demons. He departs from the
miners' own beliefs only in his claim that the demons do not
perform labor:

[The demons] seem to be doing many things, while actually
doing nothing at all. Others call them "the little men of
the mountains," indicating their usual stature, that of
dwarves about twenty-seven inches tall. And they look like old
men wearing the customary outfit of miners -- clad in a woven
shirt and with a leather hide about their loins. These spirits
usually do no harm to the miners, but simply roam about in the
shafts and underground passages; and although they do nothing,
they seem to be busily engaged in all sorts of tasks, as though
digging veins of ore, pouring the mined ore into receptacles,
and turning the hoist.7

It is not hard to see, in the demonologies of twentieth-century
Bolivian and sixteenth-century German miners, a mythological
expression of alienated labor. Unaccustomed to translating their
working hours into the objective form of a financial sum, the
workers give a physical embodiment to their externalized activity.
These demons, after all, are just as "real" -- and
"real" in the same sense -- as the imaginary exchange
value that the workers must learn to perceive in the money for
which they exchange their daily lives. It is a commonplace of
anthropology that zombie beliefs arose in the Caribbean and west
Africa as a reaction to the slave trade, and modern demonology
often reflects a similar sense that a person's labor -- that
is, his activity, his life, his self -- can easily be stolen.

10. It appears that belief in
and fear of magic increase rapidly when two economic factors
are suddenly introduced into a society: money and wage labor.
Of course, these two are really aspects of the same phenomenon
-- the alienation of labor, which demands that labor be represented
in the symbolic form of money. For example, Edwin Ardener recalls
how a zombie cult grew up rapidly among the Bakweri of Cameroon
when money was introduced into their economy in the mid-twentieth
century. In 1963, he reports:

a rumor spread that the elders had ordered that no money should
be picked up from the ground, since it was being scattered as
a lure to entice men to the waterside. There, "Frenchmen"
would use them to work as zombies on a new deep-sea harbor, or
use them to appease the water-spirits. For a number of months
it was commonplace to see coins and even low-value notes lying
about the streets of the capital.8

B.G. Stone mentions a lake in Bakweri country where "there
is a great spirit market and spirits from all over the world
are thought to meet there and barter their goods. The new
Nigerian coinage and paper money were first said to have
been introduced in this spirit market, and to have been distributed
thence to the people."9
More recently, Peter Geschiere describes the emergence
of

a new type of witches who no longer eat their victims, but
who transform them into a kind of zombie and put them to work
on "invisible plantations." The nouveaux riches
supposedly owe their success to the exploitation of these zombies'
labor. People insist on the novelty of this form of witchcraft
and often relate it to the arrival of the Europeans and the introduction
of new luxury items. (139)

Wim van Binsbergen remarks, regarding the new zombie cults,
that "the reference to earlier forms of globalisation (slave
trade) is now used in order to express and contest, in a witchcraft
idiom, newer forms of globalisation, such as the differential
access to consumer goods and post-colonial state power."10 Van Binsbergen makes
a suggestive distinction between slavery and wage labor. In slavery,
the entire being of a person is alienated, so that one person
becomes the property of another. The slave ceases to exist as
a legally autonomous subject. In wage labor, however, only the
part of a person's life which is sold as "labor" is
alienated. The person remains a legally autonomous subject, but
he gives up a portion of his life -- that is, of his self --
in exchange for a symbol of that portion. This symbol, which
is money, then attains a subjective power, so that it determines
the lives of the people whose activity it represents. A money
economy is one in which people are ruled by a fetishized representation
of their own selves. Market economies are ruled by this ghostly,
dead -- but supernaturally active -- power called money.

11. Demonology, like wage labor,
involves projection. It involves the attribution of objective
status to phenomena that are originally subjective. An economy
that represents material human activity in the form of exchange
value demands a very similar process of thought. In a sense,
then, there is nothing surprising in the recent avalanche of
studies that portray occult or magical discourses as modes of
response to the introduction of a market economy. In his study
of the djambe sorcery of the Maka, Geschiere notes that
attempts to introduce wage labor into Maka villages regularly
produce a spate of witchcraft allegations, and finds that "[n]arratives
about djambe are surprisingly similar to capitalist themes.
The Maka speak of witches as entrepreneurs who are always on
the alert and ready to appropriate new riches and powers."11 According to the Comaroffs,
"African witches become the personifications of capricious
commodities, the sirens of selfish desires." (xxv) Throughout
Africa, people speak interchangeably of magical "witches"
and wealthy "big men" who "eat" the souls
of the people:

Soul-eating is thought to be driven by an appetite for money,
a hunger unleashed, as local commentators stressed, by European
colonialism. And while its "seeds" are held to have
been inherited in earlier times, they are now a widely circulating
purchasable commodity on their own account. In fact, soul-eaters
themselves become like commodities, being capable of changing
their physiques into innumerable material forms; they take on
a life of their own and, ultimately, threaten to devour Hausa
heritage in toto. (xxv)

Pamela G. Schmoll reaches a similar conclusion from her study
of the Hausa: "soul-eating seems to have become a metaphor
for the search for money."12
Soul-eating powers were once thought to be inherited but according
to Schmoll we are now witnessing "the commoditization of
soul-eating, and now such powers can be purchased with money."
(204) One can buy the required instruction and equipment to practice
destructive magic on the streets of Mali and Burkino Faso. This
is truly a Faustian pact, however, for "in procuring the
ability to eat souls the buyer is described as being himself
enslaved and, in a moral sense, destroyed." (205)

12. Magic operates on the border
between the objective and the subjective; it is a way of studying
the process by which objects achieve subjective power and human
subjects become objectified. As Geschiere observes regarding
the Cameroon: "An intriguing aspect of these representations
is that they relativize the distinction between people and commodities.
The famla/ekong conceptions seem to reflect a process
of commodification that transforms not only goods but people
into commodities."13
With the introduction of wage labor and a market economy, people
and goods are turned into commodities in reality. But commodification
takes place only in the mind: there is no necessary material
difference between a windfall apple and an apple for sale. We
are thus dealing with a phenomenon that is both real and immaterial
-- both objective and subjective -- and this is precisely the
kind of phenomenon that theories of magic and witchcraft are
equipped to analyze. Jean and John Comaroff comment that in much
of the postcolonial world -- not only in Africa, but from Haiti
to India and from Brazil to Micronesia:

witchcraft is a finely calibrated gauge of the impact of global
cultural and economic forces on local relations, on perceptions
of money and markets, on the abstraction and alienation of "indigenous"
values and meanings. Witches are modernity's prototypical malcontents.
They provide disconcertingly full-bodied images of a world in
which humans seem in constant danger of turning into commodities,
of losing their life blood to the market and to the destructive
desires it evokes. (xxxviii)

In a world ruled by "the market," a world where
the course of people's lives is dictated not by human beings
but by human activity in the fetishized form of money, there
would seem to be a pressing need for "a practical discourse
of hidden agency," as Andrew Apter describes witchcraft.14 In the Christian societies
of early modern Europe, this "hidden agency" was identified
with Satan. Christian demonology is alive and prospering in Africa,
where it syncretizes comfortably with traditional devil-beliefs,
as Birgit Meyer has shown in her study of Pentecostalism in Ghana:

For Pentecostalists commodities become fetishes because the
Devil appropriated them before they appeared in the market (or
at the time when they are exposed in shops). Through the supposedly
innocent act of buying, the consumer is linked with Satan. Entering
into a relationship with the diabolic, owners lose their own
will and identity, their spirits and bodies are reduced to signs
which refer to, and even "glorify," the power of the
Devil. Consumption thus threatens to turn people into powerless
signs -- metonyms of the Satanic -- and in order to prevent this,
one has to be aware of the fetish-aspectof commodities and prevent them from conquering one's
spirit. What is interesting here is the close association of
Satan with the global market as the source and target of desire.15

Furthermore, today's economic and political power is won by
the control of people's minds. The most powerful political and
economic organizations in the world devote most of their resources
to honing and developing their ability to influence the purchasing
decisions of consumers and the voting decisions of electors.
In this context it is hardly surprising that people should become
aware of an external power entering into their minds and attempting
to manipulate their behavior. In the West, Marxists and their
descendants might call this power "money," but money
itself is merely a representation of financial value, which is
only an idea and has no material or physical existence. Alternatively,
we might, following Foucault, simply call it "power,"
but Foucauldian power has no center or essence; it is dispersed
among an infinity of agents and, although manifested in material
practice, it really exists only in our minds. "Money"
and "power" are phantasms, superstitions: they do things,
but they do not exist. It may be that witchcraft -- which is
the postcolonial southern hemisphere's way of discussing the
contemporary nature and exercise of power -- actually provides
a more appropriate discourse for the postmodern condition than
Western thought, which is still hampered by obsolete binary divisions
between presence and absence, being and non-being, matter and
spirit.

13. Is it, for instance, literally
true that a determinate portion of the life of someone who works
for a wage is exchanged for money? Most rational people could
probably assent to this proposition. Is it also literally true
that money, despite having a purely imaginary existence, is the
dominant power in the world? Again, few would deny this. The
argument that the world is ruled by alienated labor is entirely
rational, and literally true. Does this mean that there are sinister
"Frenchmen" who drug and kidnap Africans and force
them to work as zombies on "ghost plantations"? For
a very long time, during the slave trade, this was literally
true (and we should not forget that the slave trade is by no
means over). But in general, perhaps, the theory of zombie labor
is true today only in a symbolic sense. However, the system of
money and wage labor asserts, and is indeed based upon, the belief
in the objective reality and the practical efficacy, of the symbolic.
Could it be that the reason "enlightenment" is always
so concerned to eliminate magical beliefs from the world -- a
process beginning in sixteenth-century Europe and continuing
in twenty-first century Africa -- is that it is itself a magical
system that desires neither rivals nor critics able to understand
it on its own terms?

14. Geschiere describes "[t]he
ease with which witchcraft discourses in Africa incorporate the
money economy, new power relations, and consumer goods' as a
'paradox,'"16
because he sees in the tenacity of witchcraft an anomalous resistance
to the cultural homogenization that otherwise characterizes global
society. But the Western world too is ruled by icons, charms
and fetishes. Its inhabitants are frequently confused as to the
boundaries between fantasy and reality, their leisure time is
spent in the contemplation of images, they speak easily of the
"cult of celebrity," they dedicate their economic lives
to the accumulation of the token they call "money,"
they often understand their identities in relation to the goods
they consume. None of these tendencies is more superstitious
than witchcraft discourse. It may be, contra Geschiere,
that the postcolonial world's growing preoccupation with witches
represents not a reaction against cultural homogenization but
a particularly instructive instance of it.

III

15. Before beginning our analysis
of the Faust myth, we should first understand the logic connecting
a belief in the efficacious sign with Satanism. Its most lucid
expression is found in Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles.
Aquinas argues that ceremonial magicians are not, as they claim
to be, pious or at worst disinterested scientists, but servants
of the devil:

For in the practice of their art they make use of certain
significative words in order to produce certain definite effects.
Now, words, in so far as they signify something, have no power
except as derived from some intellect; either of the speaker,
or of the person to whom they are spoken. From the intellect
of the speaker, as when an intellect is of such great power that
it can cause things by its mere thought, the voice serving to
convey, as it were, this thought to the things that are to be
produced. From the intellect of the person to whom the words
are addressed, as when the hearer is induced to do some particular
thing, through his intellect receiving the signification of those
words. Now, it cannot be said that these significative words
uttered by magicians derive efficacy from the intellect of the
speaker. For since power follows essence, diversity of power
indicates diversity of essential principles. Moreover, man's
intellect is invariably of such a disposition that its knowledge
is caused by things, rather than that it is able by its mere
thought to cause things. Consequently if there be any men that
are able of their own power to transform things by words expressive
of their thoughts, they will belong to another species, and it
would be an equivocation to call them men. . . . It follows that
these effects are accomplished by an intellect to whom the discourse
of the person uttering these words is addressed.17

Magical spells and incantations, says Aquinas, are performative
with regard not merely to the speaker's own subjective actions
(as in "I declare this bridge open") but also with
regard to the objective things of the world (as in "open
sesame"). The performative sign disrupts the logocentric
view of language because it does not refer to anything outside
itself. It thus frees signification from the tyranny of telos
and logos; a performative sign does not mean anything:
it does something. It is hardly surprising that Renaissance
Europe should have discerned a whiff of sulfur about the performative
sign, for telos and logos are Biblical terms for
the Christian God. Who, asks Aquinas, is the agent who performs
the actions of the magician's performative words? It cannot be
the magician himself, for human beings cannot achieve objective
effects by subjective force alone. It cannot be God, for God
does not submit His will to human command, nor can He be invoked
with spells or images. It cannot be the signs themselves, for
signs naturally possess no performative power. The agent who
performs the magical action can only be a spirit who does not
serve God. Despite what the magicians claim to believe, all magic
is in fact performed by Satan or his subsidiary demons, and the
proof of this lies in its use of allegedly efficacious
signs. I emphasize the qualification because Aquinas does not
believe that signs can be efficacious in fact. He does not even
believe that magicians truly think that signs are efficacious.
They may claim that they believe this, but only in an attempt
to conceal the true nature of their art, which is the invocation
of evil spirits:

matter cannot, by definite figures, be disposed to receive
a certain natural effect. Therefore magicians do not employ figures
as dispositions. It remains, then, that they employ them only
as signs, for there is no third solution. But we make signs only
to other intelligent beings. Therefore the magic arts derive
their efficacy from another intelligent being, to whom the magician's
words are addressed. This is also proved by the very name of
character which they apply to these figures: for a character
is a sign. Whereby we are given to understand that they employ
these figures merely as signs shown to some intellectual nature.18

Aquinas is convinced that signs are not autonomous; they have
no meaning or effect in themselves, but achieve their ends through
being understood by an intellect. Magical signs are not directed
towards God, being noncanonical and frequently resulting in malign
or selfish effects. Therefore they must be directed to the devil,
and thus all ceremonial magic is revealed as inherently Satanic
in nature.

16. Furthermore, according to
the tradition of Thomistic scholasticism, the manipulation of
signs was the only way in which Satan could achieve any objective
effect. He was not capable of creation ex nihilo; only
God possessed that power. The devil does not operate in the realm
of essence but in the that of appearance. Jacopo Passavanti's,
The Mirror of True Penitence (ca. 1350) observes that
"The devil cannot change one thing substantially into another,
transforming the nature of things, or creating something out
of nothing, which is proper only to God, although he can make
things appear to change."19
This is also the reason why Satan can only enter into the human
mind when invoked via external rites and ceremonies: "the
devil cannot know the thoughts and will of the human heart except
in such a way as can be perceived by act or sign, or by something
else that manifests itself externally."20

17. During the Renaissance,
this scholastic view of magic faced formidable opposition from
Hermetic neoplatonism. Magicians like Pico della Mirandola and
Marsiglio Ficino contended that ritual magic could release the
hidden powers of nature without the aid of evil spirits. It is
this contention that works such as the Faust book attempt to
repudiate. If any magical effects seemed to have been achieved
by the magician's own power, this could only be a trick played
by the devil to lure the sorcerer into his clutches. This argument
thus furthered the cause of the centralization of evil: there
could be no nonsatanic magic. Sceptics in the witchcraft debates
used this reasoning to exonerate accused witches, since the maleficia
were performed by Satan rather than the unfortunates in the dock.
The prosecutorial retort was that the witches had undeniably
perpetrated at least one maleficium -- they had put their
faith in the Satanic power of signs.

18. Many twentieth-century critics
and historians have applauded seventeenth-century sceptics like
Johann Weyer, Reginald Scot and George Gifford for denying that
the accused witches were capable of the subtle conjurings, the
Latin incantations or the esoteric lore which were needed to
effect a pact with the devil. But many of their contemporaries
thought that such men had missed the point of the witchcraft
allegations. Whatever degraded rituals the supposed witches might
possibly have performed (it seems doubtful that most of them
performed any but this is obviously unprovable), the prosecutorial
argument was that such ceremonies were not the cause but the
effect of the Satanic pact. The witches' belief in the efficacy
of the sign was in itself proof that her mind was given over
to the devil, following the logic of Augustine's City of God:
"Exterior deeds are signs of interior deeds, just as spoken
words are the signs of things".21 As Johann von Kaysersberg wrote in 1508:

I say that what the witches or Unholden do is not a
real thing it is merely a sign; when the devil sees the sign
and hears the word, he knows what they indicate; then he performs
the act, and it is the devil who does this and not [the witches].
For the devil has made a pact with certain men and has given
them certain words and signs. When they make the signs and use
the words, the devil will do what they want, but it is the devil
who does these things. So what the witches do is only a sign,
not the deed itself.22

Writing in 1529, Martin de Castagena makes it clear that signs
have no natural, intrinsic efficacy, but can only become efficacious
through agreement with Satan:

the devil does not respond or aid the invocations and conjurations
of the necromancer by reason of any power or efficacy that the
magician's art has over the devil, for there is no such science
or art unless the two have made a pact. So he will be the best
necromancer who best follows and complies with the devil's will,
and not he who knows the most arts and formulas, as in a true
science.23

Signs, according to this logic, cannot do things by nature.
Where they seem to do things, as in magic, an unnatural power
must therefore be at work. The source of the performativity of
magical signs is thus necessarily Satanic, and therefore any
magician must by definition be in league with Satan, no matter
how implausible this might at first appear. This is the reasoning
behind the belief, ludicrous to us but firmly held by many sensible
and educated people until well into the seventeenth century,
that cunning men and women regularly sojourned forth on broomsticks
to participate in ritualistic orgies with the prince of darkness.
They might pretend to be mere herbalists or fortune tellers,
but in reality they communed with evil spirits through ceremonial
media, even when they did not fully understand what they were
doing. Interrogations of accused witches rarely involved good-faith
attempts to determine what had actually happened. Rather, they
appear designed to instruct the witch as to the true nature of
his or her magical activities. Against the protestations of respectable
magicians like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee, the anti-witch
campaigners insisted that it was always and inherently evil to
try to achieve practical effects through the manipulation of
signs. Unlike Agrippa and Dee, the historical Johann Faust was
by no means respectable, and he provided the perfect vehicle
with which to slander the art of magic in its entirity.

IV

20. I do not mean to minimize
the differences between the witch discourses of early modern
Europe and those of today's postcolonial world. In postmodern
Africa and South America, the connection of magic and the market
is generally quite explicit. Postcolonial witches are assumed
to have mastered both of these homologous24 occult forces. They tend to be identified with
rich and powerful "big men," who can clearly be seen
to have acquired wealth and influence by nontraditional means.
It is those who profit most blatantly from the market economy
who are suspected of witchcraft. In early modern Europe, however,
the economic animus behind witchcraft discourse was directed
against a very different kind of target. Those most often convicted
of witchcraft during the Renaissance were destitute and/or mentally
disturbed old women. This was by no means universally true, but
on the whole witches were held to be those who had suffered most
by the introduction of a money economy, the decline of traditional
kinship ties and the breakdown of religiously mandated charitable
obligations. As Ralph A. Austen has remarked, "European
antiwitchcraft beliefs represent a moral economy of, and
not opposed to, capitalism."25

21. Today's witchcraft discourse,
then, associates ritual magic with the financial magic of the
market, while the people convicted of witchcraft in early modern
Europe were precisely those who were excluded from the market
-- beggars, vagrants, the infirm. This has led some historians
and anthropologists to question whether their disciplines can
have very much to say to each other on the question of witchcraft.
Keith Thomas's essay on "The Relevance of Social Anthropology
to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft" argues that
demonology was peripheral to English witchcraft discourse. He
claims that the "charity denied" thesis explains "the
overwhelming majority"26
of English witch trials. In England, the witch craze "represent[s]
the breakdown of the tradition of mutual help upon which many
English village communities were based" (63) and "arose
at a time when the old tradition of mutual charity was being
sapped by the introduction of a national Poor Law." (67)

22. Thomas's claims hold good
until the mid-sixteenth century, but the evidence suggests an
increasing stress on the Satanic from that point on. For example,
the first anti-witch act passed in England (1542) does not mention
the devil; the second (1563) forbids the invocation of evil spirits,
and the third (1604) makes consorting with demons a capital offence.
The original Historia von Dr. Faustus, which was probably
translated into English in 1588, marks an important conceptual
stage in the identification of magic with Satanism. I would argue
that, to the extent that England was an exception to the view
of witchcraft as diabolical that prevailed on the continent,
this was because many of the anxieties about the power of Satan
that were projected onto ordinary witches elsewhere were directed,
in the English context, toward the learned, powerful sorcerer
who was personified in the figure of Faust.

23. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the "charity denied" theory of witchcraft
was a staple recourse of sceptics, who poured scorn on the idea
that those accused and convicted of witchcraft possessed any
genuine magical powers. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1584) describes witches as "miserable wretches" who
"go from house to house, and from doore to doore for a pot
full of milke, yest, drinke, pottage, or some such releefe; without
the which they could hardlie live" (4). When their requests
are rejected, which "falleth out many times," (5) these
mendicants sometimes utter "cursses, and incantations"
against the hard-hearted householders. In the inevitable course
of events, some of the old women's enemies eventually suffer
misfortune, and this becomes the basis for a formal charge of
witchcraft. Scot's concern is to deny any causal relation between
the old woman's curse and the neighbor's bad luck. He argues
that this connection assumes an untenable link between subjective
desires and objective events. The essential delusion, shared
by witch and accuser, is that subjective feelings, when sufficiently
strong and appropriately mediated through the symbols of ritual
magic, can be efficacious in the objective world. To bring in
a guilty verdict, the prosecution must force the witch to acquiesce
in this superstition. Witch trials, according to Scot, are thus
little more than instruments for perpetuating the magical consciousness
that they claim to be attacking:

The witch being called before a Justice, by due examination
of the circumstances is driven to see hir imprecations and desires,
and hir neighbors harms and losses to concurre, and as it were
to take effect: and so confesseth that she (as a goddes) hath
brought such things to passe. Wherein, not onelie she, but the
accuser, and also the Justice are fowlie deceived and abused
(5)27

For Scot, along with Weyer, George Gifford, and other sceptics,
the poverty of most accused witches was sufficient proof of their
innocence. If witches genuinely possessed supernatural powers,
they would surely use them to improve their miserable lot. A
similar situation pertains in the postcolonial world today, where
a poor or powerless witch is virtually a contradiction in terms.
This is because postcolonial witchcraft discourses lack the distinction
made in early modern Europe between eminent sorcerers and indigent
witches. Although modern witches in Ecuador or the Cote d'Ivoire
may possess vastly different amounts of skill and power, the
differences between them are of degree rather than of kind. In
sixteenth-century Europe, however, the witch and the sorcerer
were generally thought of as members of quite distinct species.

24. The distinction rested on
whether the magician was the servant or the master of the devil.
As James VI of Scotland claimed in his Demonologie,"Witches are servants only, and slave to the Devil;
but the Necromancers are his masters and commanders."28 Renaissance Europe
witnessed a concerted effort by religious and secular authorities
to associate all belief in the efficacy of the sign with Satanism.
An educated sorcerer, however, might in principal be able to
manipulate his pentagrams and incantations in such as way as
to bend the forces of darkness to his will. Such a man might
claim sufficient expertise to avoid dealing with the diabolical,
or even to be doing good by bringing the infernal powers to heel.
An illiterate folk magician, on the other hand, would be easy
prey for Satan's wiles, and would find themselves compelled to
serve him. Scot and company mocked the idea that illiterate women
could command the devil, but even sceptics did not deny that
black magic was successfully practiced by some sorcerers. In
fact, a common sceptical gambit was to exonerate the convicted
witches by blaming all magic on sorcerers who were skilled or
connected enough to evade prosecution.

25. The legend of Doctor Faustus
proved especially useful for this purpose. A somewhat ambiguous
figure emerges from the fragmentary references we have to the
historical Faust, but on one thing almost all the sources are
agreed: he was an incorrigible braggart, who lost no opportunity
to boast of the extent of his learning and power. He was thus
an ideal candidate to represent the overweening sorcerer, and
one of the main purposes of the Faust-book is to unmask
such figures as ordinary witches -- that is, mere servants of
Satan, and not the masterful commanders of the dark powers that
they claimed to be. Faust is first mentioned in the context of
the witch debate in the 1568 edition of Johann Weyer's De
praestigiis daemonum. Weyer's comprehensive volume is arguably
the most influential sceptical work of the sixteenth century,
and the major source for English sceptics like Scot and Gifford.
It employs what will become the standard tactic of focussing
culpability onto a single, powerful magician, thus denying that
diabolical magic is practiced by the masses of people accused
of it. Weyer accounts for attempts made by a "schoolmaster
at Goslar" to charm Satan into a bottle by claiming he was
"trained from the teachings of the magician Faust"
(52), and revealingly declares that he will describe Faust's
art to the reader only "on condition that he first pledge
to me that he will not imitate him." (52) An important source
of Johann Spies's original Faust-book (1587) was Augustin Lercheimer's
Bedencken (1585), a witch tract that mentions Faust's
pact with the devil in an attempt to excuse ordinary witches
for the prevalence of magically-induced evil in the world. As
John Henry Jones puts it in the Introduction to his edition of
the English translation of Spies's work, "What principally
fueled the public interest in Faustus during this period was
the climactic intensification of the German witch craze."
(4)

26. Johann Spies's Historia
von Dr.Faustus was printed in Frankfurt in 1587,
and immediately translated and published throughout north-west
Europe. It is a polemical tract, concerned to establish certain
definite propositions: that there is no such thing as benign
magic, that all magic involves the fetishization of signs, that
all magic is therefore Satanic and idolatrous, and that any attempt
to manipulate the devil through magic is doomed to miserable
failure. It is also a highly topical work, as Spies remarks in
his preface: "Everywhere, at parties and social gatherings,
there is great inquiry for a history of this Faustus."29 The documentary evidence
we have concerning the historical Johann (or George) Faust offers
only hints regarding the reasons for this curiosity. He is first
referred to in 1507 when a rival magician, Johannes Tritheim,
calls him "a vagabond, a babbler and a rogue, who deserves
to be thrashed so that he may not henceforth rashly venture to
profess in public things so execrable and so hostile to the holy
church."30 The
objectionable comment in question is probably Faust's claim to
be "the prince of necromancers." Tritheim also reports
that Faust was expelled from a position as schoolmaster because
"he began to indulge in the most dastardly kind of lewdness
with the boys." (86)

27. But our sparse evidence
indicates contradictory views of Faust. In 1513, the canon of
the church of St. Mary's in Gotha called Faust "a mere braggart
and fool" (87), but in 1520 he was paid ten guilders by
the bishop of Bamberg for a "horoscope or prognostication."
(89) In 1528 he was expelled from Ingolstadt and "told to
spend his penny elsewhere" (90), but the city council was
sufficiently respectful of his powers that he was induced to
pledge "not to take vengeance or make fools of the authorities
for this order." (90) In 1532, the city of Nuremberg refused
safe conduct to "Doctor Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer"
(90), but in 1536 the chronicle of Waldeck reports his successful
prediction of the fall of Munster, and in 1540 a leader of the
Welser troops in Venezuela mentions his accurate forecast of
their expedition's failure. In 1539, the city physician of Worms
complained that many people have been defrauded by Faust, for
"in receiving money he was not slow." (95) The final
reference to him as still living dates from 1540, though he probably
died the previous year.

28. These fragments are suggestive
in themselves, but more remarkable is the body of stories and
legends that immediately became associated with Faust's name.
The story of Faust teasing a group of monks, which is present
in Spies's volume, is found in a sermon published as early as
1548. There were probably songs and poems about Faust circulating
in German universities by the mid-sixteenth century, a Latin
manuscript of Faust legends may have existed before 1570, and
Spies's Historia is based on a lost earlier Faust book
written in German, the Wolfenbuttel manuscript, which was composed
between 1572 and 1587.31
This version, like Spies's, assimilates stories told of other
magicians to the by now familiar Faustian anecdotes. Before we
meet him, then, Faust has already become a composite symbol for
the magician and a synecdoche for magic in general. This role
was reinforced by a series of sequels and adaptations of the
story. A versified Faust book was published in 1588, the first
"Wagner book"detailing the adventures of Faust's
dull-witted servant appeared in 1593, and we can date the inception
of scholarly treatments of Faust to 1599, when Georg Rudolf Widman
brought out an extended edition of the Historia complete
with extensive commentary, learned research into previous magicians,
and bilious theological invective.

29. Frank Baron's Faustus
on Trial: The Origin of Johann Spies's Historia in an
Age of Witch-hunting (1992) argues that the Historia
is itself a witch tract. Baron records the extraordinary number
of witch trials and executions taking place in southern and western
Germany in the years leading up to the publication of Spies's
book -- in the 1580's there were 300 executions for witchcraft
in Trier alone. He records Spies's zeal to advance the Lutheran
cause, notes that he published mainly religious propaganda, details
his close connections with the religious and secular authorities
in Frankfurt, and concludes that the Historia should be
considered a semi-official proclamation concerning the true nature
of witchcraft: "Spies was thus one of those who worked hand
in hand with authorities to promote measures that would make
the crime of the devil pact too costly to commit." (141)
Faust, as Spies presents him, is a witch, and the Historia's
account of his life is Faust's "retroactive trial for witchcraft"
(145):

Is it bold to suggest that the story of Faustus is primarily
the product of the trials for witchcraft? The anonymous author
submits Faustus to a retroactive trial. The narrator took his
role as a representative of the religious and secular authorities
seriously, and he had no difficulty imagining what the authorities
expected Faustus to have experienced and felt. (4)

Contemporaries certainly seem to have been aware of Faust's
emblematic role in the construction of learned witches. When,
in 1594, Dr. Dietrich Elade, a judge and the richest man in Trier,
was burned for witchcraft, the local news-sheet reminded its
readers that: "He is like Doctor Faustus; a great big book
could be written about his magical deeds."32 According to Baron, "The Historia was
believed to inspire precisely the evil diabolical deeds that
it claimed to prevent" (55) -- it was banned in Strasburg,
Basle and Tubingen, and in 1596 the latter city witnessed the
arrest of David Leipziger for making a written offer of a pact
with the devil, who he hoped would help him pay his debts. Leipziger
was apparently inspired by the Historia's sequel, the
"Wagner book" of 1593. As Baron shows, the deeds and
thoughts attributed to Faust in Spies's text parallel the confessions
forced from accused witches in rather disturbing detail. In a
sinister sense, the true authors of the Historia may have
been the interrogators and torturers of the witch prisons:

In an age of daily witch trials, executions, and panics, the
story served a social function dictating the proper attitude
toward diabolical phenomena. In this sense, torture chambers
of the sixteenth century and the interrogations of persons accused
of witchcraft, which produced a steady stream of confessions,
set the stage for the evolution of the Faustian pact.33

It is certainly hard to read sixteenth-century accounts of
witch trials without being struck by the topicality of the Historia.
It addresses itself, for example, to the vexed issue of whether
witches could fly.34
They regularly claimed to do so in their confessions, and much
controversy was expended on whether this was literally true or
only so in their imaginations. Even before the Faust book's publication,
the historical Faust had been associated with attempts to attain
the power of flight. Phillip Melanchthon uses one such anecdote
to connect Faust to Simon Magus, another archetype of the magician
in the Renaissance. Melanchthon relates how, in the apocryphal
Gospel of Peter, Simon visits Rome: "There [in the presence
of Nero] Simon Magus tried to fly to heaven. . . . Faust also
tried this at Venice. But he was sorely dashed to the ground."35

30. Barbara Rosen argues that
the idea of witches flying may have been introduced into English
witch discourse via the influence of the Faust book. The first
English tract to attribute flight to witches, A Most Wicked
Worke of a Wretched Witch, was published in 1592, within
four years of "P.F."'s English translation of Spies.36 There are certainly
notable similarities between the means of transportation chosen
by Faust and those used by witches. Witches generally rode on
a broomstick or an unlikely animal; Faust's students ride to
Strasburg on a "holly wand," while the magician himself
favors a bear, a chariot pulled by dragons, and "his swift
horse Mephistopheles" (128). This latter reference recalls
the Munich physician Johannes Hartlieb's Book of All Forbidden
Arts (1456), which scoffs at "a great foolishness, when
people think that witches with magical potions make a horse which
enters their houses, and if they wish they sit upon him and ride
many miles in a very short time. This horse is in reality the
devil."37 Let
us note at this point that, in contrast to twenty-first century
ontology, belief in the devil is for Hartlieb the opposite
of superstition, and indeed an antidote to it. The recognition
of the "reality" of the devil is what dispels the "foolishness"
of belief in supernatural transportation. The "devil"
here designates simply the source of illusion, the power which
can obliterate the distinction between image and reality.

V

31. The close connection between
hallucinations, or false images, and Satanic idols is conceded
by sceptics like Weyer. This is a significant concession, for
it implies that witches are idolaters and therefore criminal
heretics, but Weyer argues that the ignorant women on trial are
not the perpetrators but the victims of idolatry. In his support
he cites Lactantius's Divinae institutiones: "The
demons. are the ones who have taught men to make images and likenesses.
They often produce prodigies so that men may be astounded and
may lend their belief to mere likenesses of divine power."
(11-12) He also gives a Christian inflection to Aristotle's account
of hallucinations in On Sleep and Wakefulness:

the imagination is a sort of treasure-house for the forms
received through the senses. Therefore demons are able to move
the humors and spirits of sensations both interior and exterior
and thus bring certain forms and appearances to the sense-organs
as though the objects themselves were truly presenting themselves
to us from without, whether in sleep or wakefulness. (103)

In Weyer's interpretation, Aristotle's "demons"
merge into the Christian "Devil": "And by causing
them to imagine that they see present before them the things
which he has imposed upon them, the Devil so maddens the persons
whom he uses for these ministries that they totally lose their
own control of themselves; like people enslaved, they ponder
and gaze upon those things which the demon presents." (105)
As his opponents quickly pointed out, this rather undercuts Weyer's
later contention that "[Witches] revere and cherish one
teacher only, their imagination, which is corrupted by the various
imaginings introduced by an unclean spirit." (133) The witch-finders
would argue that the true object of the witch's reverence is
not "their imagination" but the all-too real "unclean
spirit" to whom they have ceded control over that faculty.
The devil cannot enter a human mind unless he is invited, and
his choice of acolyte is not arbitrary but results from the individual's
own predisposition, as Augustine pointed out: "Spirits who
wish to deceive someone devise appropriate signs for each individual
to match those in which they see him caught up through his speculations
and the conventions he accepts."38

32. Like the witch tracts, the
Historia debates the issue of whether Faust's fantastic
journeys took place in reality or in imagination, concluding
that the more outlandish destinations are visited in only in
the magician's fancy: "But mark how the devil blinded him
and made him believe that he carried him into hell, for he carried
him into the air, where Faustus fell into a sound sleep, as if
he had sat in a warm water or bath." (120) The English translation
finds it necessary to further emphasize Faust's belief in the
reality of the illusions to which he has been subjected: "When
he awaked, he was amazed, like a man that had been in a dark
dungeon, musing with himself if it were true or false that he
had seen hell, or whether he was blinded or not: but he rather
persuaded himself that he had been there than otherwise, because
he had seen such wonderful things" (122, italics designate
additions by the English translator). P.F. repeatedly uses the
word "blinded" to refer to the mistaking of an image
for reality, as when Faust prepares a pseudo-feast for some nobles
in an imaginary castle. After their illusory repast, however,
"to their thinking they had neither eaten nor drunk, so
were they blinded the whilst that they were in the castle"
(157).

33. What happens, ethically
speaking, in our minds or souls when we are so "blinded"
as to mistake a sign for a referent, an image for reality? The
witch-craze reflects the Renaissance period's assumption that
this mistake is Satanic in nature. In countless treatises of
the period we find the question of whether or not the witches
have literally committed maleficia blithely dismissed
as an irrelevance. Johann von Kaysersberg's Die Emeis
(1508) asks whether witches can truly fly, and reaches what to
us may be a puzzling verdict: "when they go thus hither
and yon, do they really travel, or do they remain? Or are they
there in spirit? I say that they do travel hither and yon, but
that they also remain where they are, because they dream that
they travel, since the devil can create an impression in the
human mind. . . ."39
The most notorious of all witch-finders' manuals, Kramer and
Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (1487) airily remarks that
witches "can transport themselves from place to place through
the air, either in body or in imagination."40 Incomprehensibly from the viewpoint of modern
law, it does not appear to matter which. Pico della Mirandola's
Strix (1523), which is based on actual witch trials witnessed
by Pico in Bologna, confirms the prevalence of this attitude:

Apistius: Why do you think that sometimes they are transported
bodily and sometimes only imagine that they are?

Dicaste: Sometimes it happens through a deception of the demon
and sometimes by the choice of the witches. I remember that Henry
and James [Kramer and Sprenger, the authors of the Malleus
Maleficarum], German theologians, wrote about a certain witch
who made the voyage now by one means, now by another, just as
she pleased, that is, sometimes flying bodily, and at other times
flying only in her imagination. It doesn't matter to us whether
they go in the body or the spirit, on foot or on horseback. But
to have renounced the faith to which they have sworn, scorned
the sacraments and the Christian faith, to have adored the demon
and committed many crimes, which is why we interrogate them.This
is condemned. . . .41

One of the earliest witch tracts to be printed in English,
the Huguenot Lambert Daneau's De veneficiis (1575, orig.
1564) also uses dialogue to register the importance of the debate
regarding the veridical status of the black sabbath: "Theophilus:
Don't you believe, Anthony, that sorcerers meet together and
are bodily present at their devilish conventicles and synagogues?
Anthony: Only mentally and under the illusions of the devil.
Theophilus: I don't deny that this is a matter of great controversy.
. . ."42 Such
passages attempt to explain why accused witches frequently confessed
to such manifest impossibilities as flying on cats to the North
Pole, there to feast on infants and perform analingus on the
devil. The Faust book suggests that, although they are not literally
true, such absurd confessions nevertheless offer irrefutable
proof of demonic possession, and so of witchcraft.

34. Post-enlightenment commentators
on the witch-craze were often disconcerted by what they saw as
the childlike credulity of the prosecutors. How could rational
people believe in flying broomsticks? But to ask this question
is to miss the essential point of the witch-trials. The mass
prosecution of witches only becomes possible at the historical
moment when the distinction between imagination and reality disappears.
It did not matter whether or not witches "really" indulged
in demonic orgies, and the trials almost never involve forensic
evidence either proving or denying such activities. What mattered
was whether or not the witch believed such things had
taken place, and this was the question that the pre-trial investigations
were designed to determine. A witch's belief in her ability to
fly, or in any other instance of the efficacy of magic, was in
itself proof of an agreement with Satan.

35. Although many witches confessed
to flying, this stretched the credulity of all but the most fanatical
prosecutors. Surely the devil had somehow convinced them that
they could fly, but this could not possibly be objectively true,
despite the fact of the witches' subjective beliefs. During the
course of the witch-craze, however, the distinction between objective
and subjective events is elided, and many authorities reached
the conclusion that it simply did not matter whether the witches'
nocturnal excursions took place in the objective or the subjective
realm -- both kinds of flight were equally "real,"
and equally indicative of a diabolical pact. Martin de Castanega's
Tratado muy sotil y bien fundado (1529) follows this pattern
of reasoning:

Some really go to faraway places by the devil's aid; others,
carried away out of their senses as in a heavy sleep, have diabolical
revelations of remote and occult -- and often false -- things.
These latter are deceived by the devil, yet take pleasure and
delight in those things as if their bodies were really there.
All disciples, whether of the first or second kind, have an explicit
and express pact with the devil and he with them. . . .43

This attitude involves a more sophisticated process of reasoning
than it has usually been credited with. Imagine that a village
cunning man looks into bird entrails to see the future, or that
a rejected beggar-woman seeks revenge by burning an image of
her enemy. Perhaps such acts can never be efficacious. But what
really happens when such rituals are conducted? For the witch-hunters,
the significant event has taken place within the witch's mind.
She has committed the grievous epistemological sin of putting
her faith in the sign, and this in itself constitutes a deal
with the devil. It is true that prosecutors did try to establish
that the accused had indeed harmed people, but it was generally
not necessary to prove this to secure a conviction -- it was
only necessary that the witch confess to believing that she could
do things with signs. The clinching argument of the sceptics,
which eventually made witch trials impossible, was that by placing
such cosmic importance on the hermeneutical attitudes of basically
harmless and confused people, the prosecutorial attitude itself
betrayed a superstitious fear of the performative sign.

36. The Historia collects
tales that were first told of various sorcerers, including the
historical Faust, but also Roger Bacon, Paracelsus and Agrippa.
Two internationally famous magicians with unsavory reputations
for necromancy, John Dee and Giordano Bruno, were both in Saxony
in 1586, the year before the Historia's publication.44 It seems that the book's
propagandist mission is to establish that the magic practiced
by such learned men is Satanic, and therefore falls under the
category of witchcraft. That is to say, the Faust book argues
that all magic is witchcraft, whether the witch inhabits
the court or the hedgerow. It is possible, then, that we have
an explanation for the discrepancy between twenty-first century
theories of witchcraft as the tool of the rich and powerful and
the sixteenth-century conception of witchcraft as the last weapon
of the desperate. In early modern Europe, the role of the magical
"big man" was not played by the kind of people we are
accustomed to think of as witches, but by sorcerers like Johann
Faust.

VI

37. An early anecdote about
Faust, originally found in the mid-sixteenth-century Reichmann-Wambach
chronicle, though known to us from a later source, shows him
loudly proclaiming his command over demonic labor. As usual it
takes place in a tavern, where Faust

knocks with a knife on the table. Soon someone enters and
says: "Sir, what do you wish?" Faust asks "How
quick are you?" The other answers: "As an arrow."
"No," says Dr. Faust, "you shall not serve me.
Go back to where you came from." Then he knocks again and
when another servant enters and asks the same question, he says:
"How quick are you?" "As the wind," says
he. "That is something," says Dr. Faust, but sends
him out again too. But when he knocked a third time, another
entered and, when he was asked the same question, said he was
as quick as the thoughts of man. "Good," said Dr. Faust,
"you'll do."45

The essential claim of the sorcerer is the ability to appropriate
and direct supernatural labor. In the Renaissance this claim
was also espoused by pious neoplatonists like Pico della Mirandola,
who distinguishes between weak magicians who serve Satan and
powerful sorcerers who can command him: "For just as that
first form of magic makes man a slave and a pawn of evil powers,
so the second form makes him their ruler and lord."46

38. The author of the Historia
wants to carry the point that the magician's power over the
devil is illusory, that Faust is in fact Mephistopheles' servant
and not his master. The description of superstition as enslavement
by idols is ancient. Augustine's On Christian Teaching,
for example, declares that "When free people go to see such
an astrologer, they pay money for the privilege of coming away
as slaves of Mars or Venus. . . ."47 At the beginning of Spies's book, Faust blasphemously
misreads Scripture to prove that his "servant" is more
powerful than Emperor or Pope: "and repeated certain words
out of Saint Paul to the Ephesians to make his argument good:
The Prince of this world is upon earth and under heaven."
(138) Once Faust's prideful certainty of his dominance over the
devil has been established, the author sets systematically about
demolishing it. As Mephistopheles informs his victim, he himself
is but a servant of Lucifer: "Faustus, thou shalt understand,
that with us it is even as well a kingdome, as with you on earth:
yea we have our rulers and servants, as I my selfe am one."
(139) In an explicit attack on the concept of "white"
magic, he says that devils have never helped anyone unless they
promise to be "ours" (95), and he repeatedly reminds
the increasingly wretched magician that "thou art mine"
(108). Faust himself sums up the situation acutely, complaining
to Mephistopheles about the reversal of their roles: "I
have taken thee unto me as a servant to do me service and thy
service will be very dear unto me, yet I cannot have any diligence
of thee further than thou list thyself, neither doest thou in
any thing as it becometh thee." (116)

39. This is another issue where
the Historia intervenes in the topical debates concerning
witchcraft. One of George Gifford's characters asks his interlocutor
to "tell me, whether do you thinke that the witch or the
divell is the servant; which of them commaundeth, and which obeyeth?"
(26) This was literally a burning question, for on it depended
whether or not the witch was legally culpable for the harm she
was accused of doing. Gifford's respondents have different opinions
on the matter. "Daniel," the more naive of them, decides
that "the witch is the vassall of the divell, and not he
her servant; he is lord and commaundeth, and she is his drudge
and obeyeth." (27) "M.B.," a wiser figure, offers
a more subtle theory, which explains the Faustian delusion of
power over the devil: "Yea, although he is lord, yet he
is content to serve her turne, and the witches confesse, they
call them forth and send them, and they hire them to hurt such
in their bodies, and in their cattell" (27). Satan is undoubtedly
"lord" over the witches, but he gives them the false
impression that he is available for "hire." Like Faust,
the witches foolishly believe that they have purchased the labor-power
of Satan by an act of contractual exchange, but the deal is fraudulent,
and it is impossible for human beings truly to exercise control
over spiritual powers. The witches, and we must consider Faust
among them, do Satan's work and not vice versa.

40. The declared purpose of
true magic was to control spirits, not to be controlled by them,
and the ritual magicians of the "Faustian" school scorned
Satan and all his works (although as Butler observes, the Fausti
Hollenzwang (1540) does provide "documentary evidence
that at least one diabolic work existed amongst the many pious,
orthodox and utilitarian rituals of the Faustian school."
(205)) The Historia argues that this purpose is unattainable,
and in this sense there is no such thing as "true"
magic, only Satanic and heretical delusion. The author specifically
describes Faust's art as "heresy" (101), but the precise
sense in which the term is used may elude the modern reader.
Faust does not, at first, appear to follow any particular doctrine
or dogma such as we associate with heretical thought -- he is
not a Cathar, a Bogomil, an antinomian, a Papist or an anabaptist.
He is a witch and, unlike the people of the sixteenth century,
we do not usually think of witchcraft as an ideology or system
of thought. In fact, however, the Faust-book endows its antihero
with a clear and consistent world-view, which we might profitably
study. In doing so, we may find that we are all witches now.

41. Today we are quite familiar
with the concept of virtual reality, whereby images seem to displace
their referents. The early modern debate over witchcraft operates
within a similar discursive field. As we have seen, the issue
of whether witches could fly provided the paradigmatic example.
The Historia makes it clear that Faust literally flies
through the heavens, but it also uses flying as a metaphor for
the antihero's vaulting imagination: "taking to him the
wings of an Eagle, he thought to flie over the whole world, and
to know the secrets of heaven and earth; for his Speculation
was so wonderfull, being expert in using his Vocabula, Figures,
Characters, Conjurations, and other Ceremoniall actions, that
in all haste hee put in practise to bring the Divell before him."
The performative sign, as Austin and Derrida have taught us,
transcends the distinction between truth and falsehood. Early
modern witch-finders understood this when they disregarded the
difference between literal and figurative airborne excursions.
The major difficulty faced by the witch-finders was that most
accused witches were obviously not trained magicians, and this
is where Faust comes in. He fills a gap in the theological and
legal discourses concerning witchcraft, providing the textbook
example of the learned witch that was lacking from the empirical
investigations of the witch hunters.

42. Another of the most highly-fraught
controversies in the witch debate was whether witches had sexual
intercourse with the devil, and if so, how. As with the issue
of flight, the question was whether to interpret the frequent
confessions of witches to sex with Satan in a figurative or a
literal sense. In the Historia, Faust himself plays the
role of incubus, taking the form of Mahomet and seducing
the wives of the Great Turk. The Sultan "demanded of the
six ladies if Mahomet had had actual copulation with them, according
as earthly men have" (141), and the women attest to the
physical reality of the encounter. In a passage omitted from
the English translation, the ontological status of Faust/Mahomet
is interrogated more closely:

The priests advised the Turk not to believe it had been Mahomet,
thinking it had been a phantom. But the wives said, phantom or
no, he had been very friendly with them and had shown masterly
prowess whether it were once or six times a night or even more,
and in sum, they were all highly satisfied, etc. This caused
the emperor [i.e. the Sultan] much reflexion and put him in great
perplexity. (224).

Amid the ribaldry we can discern the serious issue of whether,
and in what sense, spiritual beings can take material form. This
is arguably the essential question of the entire witch-craze:
did Satan appear to his acolytes in physical guise, engage in
sexual intercourse, or assist in airborne transportation, as
writers such as Bodin and James VI argued, and as the witches
generally claimed? Or did he insinuate himself into their minds,
making them see illusions and believe in fantasies, as Scot and
Weyer contended? The sceptics' argument drew on the dogma that
the devil cannot create anything real. He could indisputably
create illusions, however, so that the real issue rapidly became
whether or not illusions -- images, signs, apparitions -- can
have any effect on the objective world.

43. The Faust book appears to
take an equivocal position on this question. The Sultan's wives
swear that their enjoyment of Mahomet is literal and physical,
yet we know that it is merely the image of Mahomet, which has
been artificially manufactured by Faust's infernal assistants.
The issue is revisited when Emperor Charles V asks Faust to conjure
up Alexander the Great and his paramour. Stories about the summoning
of images of the illustrious dead for the entertainment of monarchs
were a staple of witchcraft discourse. Despite his concern to
acquit poor and ignorant accused witches, Weyer gives credence
to the story of "a wicked magician" at Emperor Maximilian's
court who conjured up images of Hector, Achilles and David. (21)
He emphasizes, however, that such images enjoy only a virtual
reality, and also that this virtuality is evil in origin: "nor
do souls once separated from the body and settled in their prescribe
abodes return when summoned (as the pagans believe). It is rather
the case that demons manifest themselves in the assumed form
of those souls." (60) Even in Biblical times, according
to Weyer, "The Pythian woman of Endor raised not Samuel,
but a devil-spector in the image of Samuel." (52)

44. In the Historia,
Faust tells the Emperor that he cannot raise departed human spirits,
but that the devils (of whom he believes himself commander) can
replicate their external form perfectly: "Your Majesty shall
know that their dead bodies are not able substantially to be
brought before you, but such spirits as have seen Alexander and
his paramour alive, shall appear unto you in manner and form
as they both lived in their most flourishing time" (148).
Later, Faust entertains his students by producing an image of
Helen of Troy. As with Alexander, the audience is forbidden to
speak with the apparition (162) because, as Faust indicates,
she is not Helen in a literal but merely in a figural sense.
Once they have grasped this fact, the students' lust for Helen
evaporates: "She looked round about her with a rolling hawks
eye, a smiling and wanton countenance, which near-hand inflamed
the hearts of the students but that they persuaded themselves
she was a spirit, wherefore such fantasies passed lightly away
with them" (163).

45. This reaction might seem
odd to us. Would the arousal of a group of modern youths be so
readily dissipated by the revelation that the object of their
lust was not a woman of flesh and blood but a hologram, or an
image on a screen? Faust's students seem not to be sexually tempted
by simulacra, whereas one only has to look around to see that
twenty-first century men and women are perfectly capable of finding
erotic stimulation in mere images. P.F. tries to clear up a possible
discrepancy on this subject when he substitutes real women for
the succubae conjured up by Mephistopheles for Faust's
delectation in the German edition. It is true that Faust enjoys
the favors of Helen, whom he knows to be a "spirit,"
but P.F. indicates that he has forgotten this fact when he believes
that he has impregnated her, and qualifies this by noting that
Helen was only pregnant "to his [i.e. Faustus's] seeming."
The German text laments the fact that "men fall in love
with harlots," but P.F. stresses Helen's unreality by inserting
"nay, even with furies." (163) By this stage, apparently,
Faust's sensibility has degenerated to the point where the distinction
between image and reality no longer holds.

46. The students' response to
learning that "Helen" is merely an image directs them
away from thoughts of literal reproduction and towards thoughts
of symbolic reproduction. They desire to make an image of the
image: "the students requested of him to let them see her
again the next day, for that they would bring with them a painter
and so take her counterfeit, which he denied, affirming that
he could not always raise up her spirit, but only at certain
times." (163) Faust placates them with the promise of an
image at one further remove from reality, and he evidently contrives
to deprive them of even that satisfaction: "'Yet,' said
he, 'I will give you her counterfeit, which shall always be as
good to you as if you yourselves should see the drawing thereof,'
which they received according to his promise, but soon lost it
again." (163) What the students take to be "Helen"
is itself a counterfeit; they wish to make a counterfeit of that
counterfeit, but even this degree of solidity eludes them. We
have here a succession of empty images with no objective referent.
The sexual union of Faust and Helen, which Faust knows to be
illusory but which he enjoys as if it were real, is the mythical
expression of a profound truth: Enlightenment ends, both logically
and historically, in hyper-reality.

1 As Martin Luther
puts it, "Money is the word of the devil, through which
he creates everything in the world, just as God creates through
the true word." Cited in Marc Shell, Money, Language
and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics from the Medieval
to the Modern Era (Johns Hopkins UP: Baltimore, 1993), 84n1.

4 As Keith Thomas
remarks, "In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England
was still a pre-industrial society, and many of its essential
features closely resembled those of the 'under-developed areas'
of today." Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies
in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century England
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1971), 3.

5 Introduction to
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.), Modernity and its
Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (U of
Chicago P, 1993), xxiv.

6 Michael Taussig,
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (U
of North Carolina P: Chapel Hill, 1980), xii.

24 For a discussion
of the notion of a "homology" between financial and
other forms of signification, see David Hawkes, Idols of the
Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature,
1580-1680 (Palgrave: New York, 2001), 17-25.

25 Ralph A. Austen,
"The Moral Economy of Witchcraft: an Essay in Comparative
History" in Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, 89-110, quotation
from 101.

26 Keith Thomas,
"The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical
Study of English Witchcraft" in Douglas (1970), 47-79, quotation
from 62.

27 See also Alan
Macfarlane, "Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex"
in Douglas (1970), 81-99. Macfarlane cites the Elizabethan preacher
Francis Trigge: "'we may see how experience, and the very
confessions of witches, agree that the merciful lenders and givers
are preserved of God, and unmerciful and covetous Nabals are
vexed and troubled of Satan.'" (92-3) Macfarlane agrees
with Thomas regarding the determining influence of "charity
denied" and the Elizabethan poor law on sixteenth-century
witch beliefs in England.

29 Cit. John Henry
Jones, The English Faust Book (Cambridge UP, 1994), 5.
Unless otherwise specified, references to the Faust Book will
be to this edition.

30 Philip Mason
Palmer and Robert Pattison More (eds.), The Sources of the
Faust Tradition: from Simon Magus to Lessing (Oxford UP:
New York, 1936), 83. Unless otherwise specified, further references
to the historical Faust will be cited from this edition.

45 From the mid-seventeenth
century Chronica von Thuringen und der Stadt Erffurth
of Zacharias Hogel, which is based on the Reichmann-Wambech chronicle
of a hundred years earlier. Cited in Palmer and More, 108.